Search Engine Marketing Expert is the personal blog of Richard Lee. Here you'll find the latest news and tips on Search Engine Optimization (SEO), Pay Per Click (PPC), as well as overall information and resources on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) as a whole, which now also includes components of Social Media Marketing (SMM).

E-Marketing

Social marketing is becoming increasingly more valuable for retailers. Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+, Pinterest, and Instagram are some of the social networking platforms that are being used to grow business. The following are key Social Marketing insights for retailers.

Social Marketing can help build customer engagement and product awareness:

Social marketing can help you increase engagement with your online customers, but be sure to choose the appropriate channel based on your goal. For example, Pinterest is a must for retailers because it is excellent for sharing product images. As a visual network, it provides great value to retail brands. It is also important to reach the right people. Capture core fans and bring them into your social scape via website, emails, shares, and likes within a social network. To drive awareness to your brand, optimize content to meet brands by using social analytics. You can do this by determining which posts are receiving the most engagement and creating more content from that. Continually manage and keep track of your Likes, Shares, Followers, Retweets, and Comments.

With the rise of social media, Facebook’s ability to sort social information has become just as important as Google’s ability to sort search information. Facebook’s importance as a social search engine must be considered for anyone searching for information.

Similar to Google’s PageRank, Facebook’s social search algorithm known as EdgeRank, determines the importance of content in Facebook’s search results; or in Facebook’s case, users’ newsfeeds. Newsfeeds contain the EdgeRank results of information Facebook considers most important to you. Appearing in your newsfeed are the connections deemed most important to you as well as the content they suggest or create.

Links are such as huge part of search engines and the Internet that it is hard to imagine a time when they were not the main component of the Internet. From the great directories of yesteryear like Yahoo Directory to the king of search engines Google, links have been the main currency of the digital world.

Google’s first algorithm or formula to measure popularity of a website and ultimately it’s ranking position in the search engine revolved around counting the number of links to a website. This popularity score of links held as one of the standards of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for almost a decade. Wise to the importance of obtaining links to raise their websites standing in the search engines, webmasters sought to increase the number of links to their website, often by any means necessary. With links being such a vital part of search engines and Google’s dominance as a whole, it is hard to imagine anything in the online world that could one day surpass the importance of links.

Landing pages are often the neglected parts of an online advertising campaign, but are an essential part of the conversion process. In fact, it is arguable that the landing page could be the most important element in helping conversion rates because no matter how good the outbound campaign is, once a user lands on the page, if there is a disconnect or if they do not find the sought after information in a timely manner, they are likely to abandon the process.

There are many factors to consider when designing a landing page. Some of them include:

1. Headline

This is the most important factor to a landing page. The headline is the first thing a viewer sees when coming to the landing page. As such, it needs to do the following in a concise manner:

Tell the user that they are either at the right or wrong place

If it is the right place, compel the user to continue the process

Try to keep the headline short, concise, and to the point, while at the same time, informative enough to keep the user within the funnel. Using keywords within the headline can help in both cases.

2. Call to Action

The Call to Action is anything on the landing page that tells the user to take action. Call to Actions should be obvious (if something looks clickable, it should be clickable) and visible above the fold and below the fold. The phrase used within the Call to Action should be active and concise.

In the next few weeks, Google and its Google Analytics team will be rolling out a new initiative with social-focused reports. Its goal is to help individuals and businesses measure the ROI on social media marketing.